To Organize Time: A Sketch of Nadia Boulanger

June, 1958, Harvard University presented an honorary degree to a , gray-haired, 70-year-old woman. citation to Nadia Boulanger read: half a century of teaching her influence has pervaded the musical life of two continents." Just years earlier, a young French , Nadia Boulanger, received the second Prix de Rome in musical composition for a cantata called 'La .' In the intervening decades, Nadia Boulanger studied, worked, and . And in spite of her preference for anonymity, she achieved the fame based essentially on excellence as a teacher: with Ernst Bloch Paul Hindemith she shares the of most influential music teacher the century.

Whenever Mlle. Boulanger speaks, speaks about music; whenever she speaks about music, she speaks of discipline, rigor, conscientiousness. "There is no substitute for discipline in music," she says to students. "You must go back to the basic concept of discipline in this art, and the more engrossed you become in the history of music and strict academic form, the more free you will be as you compose later on." Again, she says: "With young composers detail is infinitely important and few pay enough attention to it." Her main concern in teaching is "to develop the conscience of a musician, which is his ear." It is this care for control and intellectual tradition that makes her a great teacher, according to her students. And she can demand much of her students because in her training she demanded at least as much of herself.

Nadia Boulanger was born into a family of musicians. One grandfather was a composer, one grandmother a famous singer at l'Opera-Comique. Her father won the Prix de Rome for composition in 1835. For variety, her mother was a Russian princess. As a student at the Paris Conservatoire, she carried off first prize in every field she studied: harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ, and accompaniment. With this array of musical proficiency, she took responsibility for the musical training of her first student: her sister, Lili Boulanger. As a teacher, she succeeded. In 1913 Lili Boulanger won the Grand Prix de Rome in composition, the first woman ever to do so. Characteristically, at the competition in the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, sister Nadia accompanied the winning cantata. Nadia thought her sister's talent to be greater than her own. But unhappily, Lili died in 1918 at the age of 24. The austere Grove's Dictionary, rarely moved to rhapsody, commented that her death marked the loss of a "musical genius."

NADIA Boulanger permanently adopted the role of introducing and supporting the music of her students. She published a few orchestral and instrumental pieces, but decided to give up composing what she termed "useless music." She took an apartment on Rue Ballu in Paris, and during the 1920's held musical court.

There a young Harvard student named Aaron Copland knocked on the door and was admitted. In a book published on his sixtieth birthday, he recollects: "In my own mind she was a continuing link in that long tradition of the French intellectual woman. . . . Nadia Boulanger had her own salon where musical aesthetics were argued and the musical future engendered." Other Harvard students came--Walter Piston and Randall Thomson. For talk there were Satie, Cocteau, and Stravinsky. Copland recalls that Mlle. Boulanger "was particularly intrigued by new musical developments. . . . Nothing under the head- ing of music could possibly be thought of as foreign. I am not saying that she liked or even approved of all kinds of musical expression--far from it. But she had the teacher's consuming need to know all music functions, and it was that kind of inquiring attitude that registered on the minds of her students."

She did not accept everyone. After a ten-minute interview with George Gershwin, she turned him down. He came to her an established composer and she felt she could do nothing for him. "Never have I regretted the outcome," she says. "He died famous." She took only students from whom she could demand as complete a devotion to work as her own. And then she extracted the most she could from each of them. She commissioned Cop-land to write an organ concerto while he was studying under her, then performed the solo in the 1925 premiere conducted by Walter Damrosch.

In 1926, the Societe Musicale Independante de Paris presented a concert of chamber music by students of Boulanger. In retrospect, the collection of names on the program is a bit fantastic: Copland, Thomson, Elwell, Antheil, Chanler, Piston (whom Time incidentally, then labelled a "rip-roaring cacaphonist").

In the same year, Roy Harris joined la boulangerie. From Harvard, in a later generation, came Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger. Elliott Carter, Marc Blitzstein, Bernard Rogers, Roger Goeb, David Diamond, Ross Lee Finney, Howard Swanson, Easley Blackwood--all composed under her tutelage. Among the Europeans she taught were Igor Markevitch, Jean Francaix, Antoni Szalowski, and Darius Milhaud.

WHAT is the magic that attracts composers to Mlle. Boulanger, and what is the secret ingredient that she contributes? Copland describes his view of it in this way: "It is literally exhilarating to be with a teacher for whom the art one loves has no secrets. Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky, and knew it cold.... I am convinced that it is Mlle. Boulanger's perceptivity as a musician that is at the core of her teaching. She is able to grasp the still uncertain contour of an incomplete sketch, examine it, and fore-tell the probable and possible ways in which it may be developed. She is expert in picking flaws in any work in progress, and knowing why they are flaws."

She embodies precise and intellectualized control, and her outlook is reflected in her evaluation of music. In her eulogy in the 1953 Saturday Review on the death of Dinu Lipatti, she wrote: "When the compositions of Dinu Lipatti are all printed, the greatness of his gifts and of his craftmanship will be recognized. It will become obvious that he was really a composer, one who heard notes, rhythms, who knew and enjoyed to assemble them, to choose, and to reject, to organize time and build forms; one who found his real self in the process, and who used the technical means of his art to create the emotions resulting from achieved beauty."

While she taught, Mlle. Boulanger continued to perform and direct performances. She became known in England through several concerts at Queen's Hall and Wigmore Hall, and broadcasts of old and new French music from London. In 1936, with her own singers from Paris, she gave the first public performance in London of one of Schutz's Passions and Faure's Requiem. The next year she became the first woman to conduct a whole program of the Royal Phil-harmonic Society.

As a guest in 1938, she was the first woman conductor of the Boston Symphony. Since many of her achievements were publicized as "the first woman" sort, a Boston reporter asked her how it felt. She replied, "I have been a woman for a little over 50 years, and have gotten over my initial astonishment."

She lectured during the spring term of 1939 at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Juilliard, bringing, according to Time "pleas for admission from hordes of Harvardmen."

DURING the war years (1940-46) she lived in the United States, lecturing and teaching. She stressed the importance of beginning music training as early as possible. "Americans often do not begin serious of music until college age," she served, recounting how she training a three-year-old to learn note a day, one more each day.

In her sixtieth year she took the post of Director of the American observatory at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. There every summer she continues to hold court. During the year when she is not traveling, she stilling cupies her large apartment on Ballu.

Her friends threw a little party her seventieth birthday, at the of Igor Markevitch in the Swiss As ever, she was thin, almost in Copland's term, "nun-like." Markevitch children presented her $3,000 diamond purchased by boulangerie, and the guests broke a chorus composed for the by former student Francis Poulence was a birthday party such as few enjoy; Mlle. Boulanger had the congratulations of the musical world.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

Whenever Mlle. Boulanger speaks, speaks about music; whenever she speaks about music, she speaks of discipline, rigor, conscientiousness. "There is no substitute for discipline in music," she says to students. "You must go back to the basic concept of discipline in this art, and the more engrossed you become in the history of music and strict academic form, the more free you will be as you compose later on." Again, she says: "With young composers detail is infinitely important and few pay enough attention to it." Her main concern in teaching is "to develop the conscience of a musician, which is his ear." It is this care for control and intellectual tradition that makes her a great teacher, according to her students. And she can demand much of her students because in her training she demanded at least as much of herself.

Nadia Boulanger was born into a family of musicians. One grandfather was a composer, one grandmother a famous singer at l'Opera-Comique. Her father won the Prix de Rome for composition in 1835. For variety, her mother was a Russian princess. As a student at the Paris Conservatoire, she carried off first prize in every field she studied: harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ, and accompaniment. With this array of musical proficiency, she took responsibility for the musical training of her first student: her sister, Lili Boulanger. As a teacher, she succeeded. In 1913 Lili Boulanger won the Grand Prix de Rome in composition, the first woman ever to do so. Characteristically, at the competition in the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, sister Nadia accompanied the winning cantata. Nadia thought her sister's talent to be greater than her own. But unhappily, Lili died in 1918 at the age of 24. The austere Grove's Dictionary, rarely moved to rhapsody, commented that her death marked the loss of a "musical genius."

NADIA Boulanger permanently adopted the role of introducing and supporting the music of her students. She published a few orchestral and instrumental pieces, but decided to give up composing what she termed "useless music." She took an apartment on Rue Ballu in Paris, and during the 1920's held musical court.

There a young Harvard student named Aaron Copland knocked on the door and was admitted. In a book published on his sixtieth birthday, he recollects: "In my own mind she was a continuing link in that long tradition of the French intellectual woman. . . . Nadia Boulanger had her own salon where musical aesthetics were argued and the musical future engendered." Other Harvard students came--Walter Piston and Randall Thomson. For talk there were Satie, Cocteau, and Stravinsky. Copland recalls that Mlle. Boulanger "was particularly intrigued by new musical developments. . . . Nothing under the head- ing of music could possibly be thought of as foreign. I am not saying that she liked or even approved of all kinds of musical expression--far from it. But she had the teacher's consuming need to know all music functions, and it was that kind of inquiring attitude that registered on the minds of her students."

She did not accept everyone. After a ten-minute interview with George Gershwin, she turned him down. He came to her an established composer and she felt she could do nothing for him. "Never have I regretted the outcome," she says. "He died famous." She took only students from whom she could demand as complete a devotion to work as her own. And then she extracted the most she could from each of them. She commissioned Cop-land to write an organ concerto while he was studying under her, then performed the solo in the 1925 premiere conducted by Walter Damrosch.

In 1926, the Societe Musicale Independante de Paris presented a concert of chamber music by students of Boulanger. In retrospect, the collection of names on the program is a bit fantastic: Copland, Thomson, Elwell, Antheil, Chanler, Piston (whom Time incidentally, then labelled a "rip-roaring cacaphonist").

In the same year, Roy Harris joined la boulangerie. From Harvard, in a later generation, came Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger. Elliott Carter, Marc Blitzstein, Bernard Rogers, Roger Goeb, David Diamond, Ross Lee Finney, Howard Swanson, Easley Blackwood--all composed under her tutelage. Among the Europeans she taught were Igor Markevitch, Jean Francaix, Antoni Szalowski, and Darius Milhaud.

WHAT is the magic that attracts composers to Mlle. Boulanger, and what is the secret ingredient that she contributes? Copland describes his view of it in this way: "It is literally exhilarating to be with a teacher for whom the art one loves has no secrets. Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky, and knew it cold.... I am convinced that it is Mlle. Boulanger's perceptivity as a musician that is at the core of her teaching. She is able to grasp the still uncertain contour of an incomplete sketch, examine it, and fore-tell the probable and possible ways in which it may be developed. She is expert in picking flaws in any work in progress, and knowing why they are flaws."

She embodies precise and intellectualized control, and her outlook is reflected in her evaluation of music. In her eulogy in the 1953 Saturday Review on the death of Dinu Lipatti, she wrote: "When the compositions of Dinu Lipatti are all printed, the greatness of his gifts and of his craftmanship will be recognized. It will become obvious that he was really a composer, one who heard notes, rhythms, who knew and enjoyed to assemble them, to choose, and to reject, to organize time and build forms; one who found his real self in the process, and who used the technical means of his art to create the emotions resulting from achieved beauty."

While she taught, Mlle. Boulanger continued to perform and direct performances. She became known in England through several concerts at Queen's Hall and Wigmore Hall, and broadcasts of old and new French music from London. In 1936, with her own singers from Paris, she gave the first public performance in London of one of Schutz's Passions and Faure's Requiem. The next year she became the first woman to conduct a whole program of the Royal Phil-harmonic Society.

As a guest in 1938, she was the first woman conductor of the Boston Symphony. Since many of her achievements were publicized as "the first woman" sort, a Boston reporter asked her how it felt. She replied, "I have been a woman for a little over 50 years, and have gotten over my initial astonishment."

She lectured during the spring term of 1939 at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Juilliard, bringing, according to Time "pleas for admission from hordes of Harvardmen."

DURING the war years (1940-46) she lived in the United States, lecturing and teaching. She stressed the importance of beginning music training as early as possible. "Americans often do not begin serious of music until college age," she served, recounting how she training a three-year-old to learn note a day, one more each day.

In her sixtieth year she took the post of Director of the American observatory at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. There every summer she continues to hold court. During the year when she is not traveling, she stilling cupies her large apartment on Ballu.

Her friends threw a little party her seventieth birthday, at the of Igor Markevitch in the Swiss As ever, she was thin, almost in Copland's term, "nun-like." Markevitch children presented her $3,000 diamond purchased by boulangerie, and the guests broke a chorus composed for the by former student Francis Poulence was a birthday party such as few enjoy; Mlle. Boulanger had the congratulations of the musical world.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

Nadia Boulanger was born into a family of musicians. One grandfather was a composer, one grandmother a famous singer at l'Opera-Comique. Her father won the Prix de Rome for composition in 1835. For variety, her mother was a Russian princess. As a student at the Paris Conservatoire, she carried off first prize in every field she studied: harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ, and accompaniment. With this array of musical proficiency, she took responsibility for the musical training of her first student: her sister, Lili Boulanger. As a teacher, she succeeded. In 1913 Lili Boulanger won the Grand Prix de Rome in composition, the first woman ever to do so. Characteristically, at the competition in the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, sister Nadia accompanied the winning cantata. Nadia thought her sister's talent to be greater than her own. But unhappily, Lili died in 1918 at the age of 24. The austere Grove's Dictionary, rarely moved to rhapsody, commented that her death marked the loss of a "musical genius."

NADIA Boulanger permanently adopted the role of introducing and supporting the music of her students. She published a few orchestral and instrumental pieces, but decided to give up composing what she termed "useless music." She took an apartment on Rue Ballu in Paris, and during the 1920's held musical court.

There a young Harvard student named Aaron Copland knocked on the door and was admitted. In a book published on his sixtieth birthday, he recollects: "In my own mind she was a continuing link in that long tradition of the French intellectual woman. . . . Nadia Boulanger had her own salon where musical aesthetics were argued and the musical future engendered." Other Harvard students came--Walter Piston and Randall Thomson. For talk there were Satie, Cocteau, and Stravinsky. Copland recalls that Mlle. Boulanger "was particularly intrigued by new musical developments. . . . Nothing under the head- ing of music could possibly be thought of as foreign. I am not saying that she liked or even approved of all kinds of musical expression--far from it. But she had the teacher's consuming need to know all music functions, and it was that kind of inquiring attitude that registered on the minds of her students."

She did not accept everyone. After a ten-minute interview with George Gershwin, she turned him down. He came to her an established composer and she felt she could do nothing for him. "Never have I regretted the outcome," she says. "He died famous." She took only students from whom she could demand as complete a devotion to work as her own. And then she extracted the most she could from each of them. She commissioned Cop-land to write an organ concerto while he was studying under her, then performed the solo in the 1925 premiere conducted by Walter Damrosch.

In 1926, the Societe Musicale Independante de Paris presented a concert of chamber music by students of Boulanger. In retrospect, the collection of names on the program is a bit fantastic: Copland, Thomson, Elwell, Antheil, Chanler, Piston (whom Time incidentally, then labelled a "rip-roaring cacaphonist").

In the same year, Roy Harris joined la boulangerie. From Harvard, in a later generation, came Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger. Elliott Carter, Marc Blitzstein, Bernard Rogers, Roger Goeb, David Diamond, Ross Lee Finney, Howard Swanson, Easley Blackwood--all composed under her tutelage. Among the Europeans she taught were Igor Markevitch, Jean Francaix, Antoni Szalowski, and Darius Milhaud.

WHAT is the magic that attracts composers to Mlle. Boulanger, and what is the secret ingredient that she contributes? Copland describes his view of it in this way: "It is literally exhilarating to be with a teacher for whom the art one loves has no secrets. Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky, and knew it cold.... I am convinced that it is Mlle. Boulanger's perceptivity as a musician that is at the core of her teaching. She is able to grasp the still uncertain contour of an incomplete sketch, examine it, and fore-tell the probable and possible ways in which it may be developed. She is expert in picking flaws in any work in progress, and knowing why they are flaws."

She embodies precise and intellectualized control, and her outlook is reflected in her evaluation of music. In her eulogy in the 1953 Saturday Review on the death of Dinu Lipatti, she wrote: "When the compositions of Dinu Lipatti are all printed, the greatness of his gifts and of his craftmanship will be recognized. It will become obvious that he was really a composer, one who heard notes, rhythms, who knew and enjoyed to assemble them, to choose, and to reject, to organize time and build forms; one who found his real self in the process, and who used the technical means of his art to create the emotions resulting from achieved beauty."

While she taught, Mlle. Boulanger continued to perform and direct performances. She became known in England through several concerts at Queen's Hall and Wigmore Hall, and broadcasts of old and new French music from London. In 1936, with her own singers from Paris, she gave the first public performance in London of one of Schutz's Passions and Faure's Requiem. The next year she became the first woman to conduct a whole program of the Royal Phil-harmonic Society.

As a guest in 1938, she was the first woman conductor of the Boston Symphony. Since many of her achievements were publicized as "the first woman" sort, a Boston reporter asked her how it felt. She replied, "I have been a woman for a little over 50 years, and have gotten over my initial astonishment."

She lectured during the spring term of 1939 at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Juilliard, bringing, according to Time "pleas for admission from hordes of Harvardmen."

DURING the war years (1940-46) she lived in the United States, lecturing and teaching. She stressed the importance of beginning music training as early as possible. "Americans often do not begin serious of music until college age," she served, recounting how she training a three-year-old to learn note a day, one more each day.

In her sixtieth year she took the post of Director of the American observatory at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. There every summer she continues to hold court. During the year when she is not traveling, she stilling cupies her large apartment on Ballu.

Her friends threw a little party her seventieth birthday, at the of Igor Markevitch in the Swiss As ever, she was thin, almost in Copland's term, "nun-like." Markevitch children presented her $3,000 diamond purchased by boulangerie, and the guests broke a chorus composed for the by former student Francis Poulence was a birthday party such as few enjoy; Mlle. Boulanger had the congratulations of the musical world.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

In her sixtieth year she took the post of Director of the American observatory at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. There every summer she continues to hold court. During the year when she is not traveling, she stilling cupies her large apartment on Ballu.

Her friends threw a little party her seventieth birthday, at the of Igor Markevitch in the Swiss As ever, she was thin, almost in Copland's term, "nun-like." Markevitch children presented her $3,000 diamond purchased by boulangerie, and the guests broke a chorus composed for the by former student Francis Poulence was a birthday party such as few enjoy; Mlle. Boulanger had the congratulations of the musical world.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

Her friends threw a little party her seventieth birthday, at the of Igor Markevitch in the Swiss As ever, she was thin, almost in Copland's term, "nun-like." Markevitch children presented her $3,000 diamond purchased by boulangerie, and the guests broke a chorus composed for the by former student Francis Poulence was a birthday party such as few enjoy; Mlle. Boulanger had the congratulations of the musical world.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

And then she went right back work, teaching, directing, performance. Perhaps the creed she practices is expressed by a passage from writing on Lipatti:

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

"To perform its duty--which is to govern--the mind must have been trained in such a way that nothing can escape its control: this implies enable to catch sound, isolated as as superimposed or in linear succession, to feel rhythm (I mean rhythm and not only bar division; this in its is a subject which would require less comments), and eventually make the complex structure of the work as a whole perceptible.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

"In order to obey the commands the mind, the fingers, the hands, the arms must have achieved such a degree of independence and skill, a variety of touch, of such a delicasy a speed and strength, that they all at once perform everything which is required.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.

"That mind and body should have been granted natural faculties goes without saying; but with gifts alone one cannot get very far. It is important to remember that the greater the gifts the greater must be the character, the power of work, the conscience, the moral and spiritual value of him to whom they were given.